Federal conspiracy charges against Dr. Anthony Fauci’s senior science advisor have sparked new questions about whether the nation’s top infectious disease doctor was involved in the alleged cover-up of the origin of COVID-19. Dr. David Morens, a key player in Fauci’s inner circle at the National Institutes of Health, pleaded guilty on Aug. 18 to federal conspiracy charges in relation to destroying government records and concealing evidence related to the beginning of the pandemic.Morens, 78, was indicted in April after a congressional investigation revealed he used his position to protect controversial grant funding for Dr. Peter Daszak, his friend and head of the research firm EcoHealth Alliance, for a bat coronavirus project being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
Daszak’s project has been at the heart of the debate regarding whether SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was created at the Wuhan lab or spread via animal-to-human transmission.Morens’s guilty plea, which included admitting to deleting sensitive government files and using personal email addresses for government business, has led some to question the depth to which Fauci himself was involved in or had knowledge of the scandal. After the indictment announcement, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) questioned on X whether the plea could “involve implicating Anthony Fauci” as part of the criminal conspiracy.
